UC stages revolt against the world’s largest journal publisher

Share this:

In this Dec. 21, 2014 file photo, late light falls on Wheeler Hall, South Hall and the Campanile on the University of California campus in Berkeley, Calif. University of California officials have proposed limiting nonresident enrollment to 20 percent of all undergraduate students, in an effort to prioritize in-state applicants. The proposal introduced Monday, March 6, 2017, would be the first limit of its kind for the 10-campus public university. The Board of Regents will consider it starting next week. (Eric Risberg, File AP Photo)

Behind closed doors, the University of California is staging a revolt against the world’s largest journal publisher, threatening to drop all subscriptions when its contract with Reed Elsevier soon expires.

This is no pointy-headed dispute: Publication is how new discoveries are shared, building the foundation for future intellectual breakthroughs.

The university was poised to lose access to Elsevier’s journals when its five-year contract ends on Dec. 31. But on Friday afternoon, the adversaries agreed to extend the deadline for one more month.

If an agreement is not reached, everyone in the UC system — 21,200 faculty and 251,700 students — could face tighter access to new research findings. (Access to older articles would continue uninterrupted.) The university’s library says it would work to get them through other means, such as a loan from a non-UC library.

UC wants to change the terms of its multi-million dollar contract with Elsevier – and fundamentally reshape how research gets shared in fields ranging from particle physics to transportation studies.

As America’s largest research university system, UC believes it has the leverage to alter the century-old subscription model and accelerate open access. Its 10 campuses account for nearly 10 percent of research produced in the U.S.

“It is imperative we use this opportunity to alter our relationship, “ UC-Santa Cruz chancellor George Blumenthal, an astrophysicist, wrote in a Dec. 19 letter to faculty.

“By breaking down paywalls for scholarly journals, or at least significantly lowering costs, we can help force the creation of a more open system of knowledge-sharing,” he wrote.

The outcome of the talks could turn the research publishing world upside down. If many universities follow UC’s example, it might be calamitous for the publishers.

“What the UC system is doing is essentially calling foul — finally — on decades of price gouging by major international companies on materials that professors, students researchers need to do their work,” said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), a group of academic and research libraries based in Washington, D.C.

The dispute is stirring the highest ranks of UC’s ivory tower, with chancellors urging professors and staff to support for the university’s effort in “town hall” meetings and letter-writing campaigns.

UCLA has taken even a harder line, asking its faculty to consider publishing in other journals and stop reviewing articles for Elsevier.

The details are complicated. Currently, the UC system pays separately for subscriptions to articles and for the publication of UC research. Now UC wants a deal that allows them to pay both at once. This would make articles more freely available immediately upon publication and could reduce subscription prices.

Elsevier responds that UC can’t carve out its own terms in a global business model – and that Elsevier does not want to uproot the subscription business model that represents over 85 percent of all published research, said Tom Reller, vice president and head of the business partner communications team for global communications at Elsevier.

Universities have long fumed about the arrangement.

Companies like Elsevier assume the ”up front” costs of formatting a manuscript for publishing — and the hefty price tag for printing, binding and mailing stacks of journals. In 2017, Elsevier published more than 430,000 articles in some 2,500 journals.

But university scholars complain that they do too much volunteer work for publishers, such as “peer review” of papers. They’re angry that they don’t hold the copyrights to the papers. And they dislike paying ever-higher fees for subscription access to research. UC pays Elsevier about $11.5 million a year for nearly 2,000 journal subscriptions.

For anyone without a subscription — such as members of the general public, whose tax dollars fund much of the research — the articles can cost $35 to $40 each.

But because scholars depend on journals, they’ve been reluctant to rock the boat. They need publication to gain professional recognition. And they need access, through their libraries, to each others’ research.

Commercial publishers like Elsevier played a critical role in the 1960s and 1970s when research was burgeoning but there weren’t many specialized journals, said Ted Bergstrom, a professor of economics at UC Santa Barbara who studies journal pricing.

Publishing was done by professional societies, he said, “run by an old boy’s network.” Commercial publishers were innovative, hired top talent and charged reasonable prices for journals ranging from the prestigious Lancet to the more arcane International Journal of Rock Mechanics.

With the digital revolution, publishers discovered they could sell access to large bundles of electronic journals for a price comparable to the paper versions. Production costs fell but subscription prices soared beyond the rate of inflation — even as university budgets stagnated.

“This turned out to be a brilliant strategy,” generating operating margins of 37 to 40 percent for Elsevier, said Bergstorm. “Librarians have been furious, rightly so.”

UC’s showdown coincides with the growing “open access” movement to make science more available to the public. New journals like the non-profit Public Library of Science reverse the old model, with authors paying and readers getting subscriptions for free. Big funders like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation increasingly require that their findings be available through open access, immediately upon publication.

Academic institutions across Europe also are pushing for better deals with publishing companies. Major German and Swedish universities have canceled their Elsevier contracts.

Lisa M. Krieger is a science writer at The Mercury News, covering research, scientific policy and environmental news from Stanford University, the University of California, NASA-Ames, U.S. Geological Survey and other Bay Area-based research facilities. Lisa also contributes to the Videography team. She graduated from Duke University with a degree in biology. Outside of work, she enjoys photography, backpacking, swimming and bird-watching.